Friday, January 09, 2015

Connecticut’s Non-Partisan Spending Problem

Most of us are living in the land of Déjà Vu All Over
Again. Every fiscal year, we keep
crashing into the same icebergs.

Ben Barnes, who heads Governor Dannel Malloy’s Office of
Policy Management, has said the state may be facing chronic deficits. The last
time Mr. Malloy faced a deficit, he disposed of it through tax increases. But
the largest tax increase in Connecticut history failed to solve the problem
because Connecticut does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem.
Mr. Malloy said during his campaign that further tax increases were off the
table, at which happy news overtaxed citizens and businesses, their eyes fixed
on the exit signs, breathed a sigh of relief.

Then he began to tug the veil from his second
administration.

There is not a hint of spending reduction in any
post-election remarks made by Mr. Malloy thus far. But there is plenty of
chatter about spending: Education must be reformed; vanishing businesses in
Connecticut depend upon an educated workforce.

Thus far, educational reforms have been pushed to the back
burner by progressives – who would have guessed there are Democrats in the
state more progressive than Mr. Malloy? – who balked at what they considered to
be Mr. Malloy’s maladroit, anti-union move to tie teacher compensation to
performance. Oodles of tax cash have been dispensed to the University of
Connecticut and the UConn Heath Center, while urban students still are being
pushed through public school pedagogical sausage machines without noticeable
improvement in their reading and math skills. Public school vouchers given to
parents would instantly transform Connecticut’s educational environment by
allowing consumers to choose which educational product best suits their
children.

But… noooo... Can’t do that – too revolutionary, too inexpensive.
Imagine allowing parents to purchase directly the services of a teacher based
upon the same rational criteria one consults when buying a house or a car or a
candy bar or even a politician to whom one sends campaign contributions.
Vouchers would, almost in the blink of an eye, tie teacher compensation to
performance; good schools, watered by vouchers, would proliferate; bad schools
would perish – as well they should. Good teachers would be rewarded; bad
teachers would find some other line of work. Dollars would fly to curriculum
structures that worked.

"Together, let us continue to buck the national trends
of obstruction and gridlock. Let us dismiss petty partisanship that divides us,
and focus instead on what binds us to one another." So said Governor
Dannel Malloy during his inaugural address at the State Armory.

But partisanship never has been a threat to Mr. Malloy. In
the first few weeks of his first term, Mr. Malloy pushed forward what may
accurately be described as a wholly partisan budget. Unlike his predecessors,
he was able to form a budget without ANY Republican input. Republican Governors
John Rowland and Jodi Rell presented their budgets to a highly partisan
Democratic General Assembly. Mr. Malloy, after receiving from the Democratic
controlled General Assembly near plenipotentiary powers to negotiate his budget
with union chiefs not elected by the general public, felt very comfortable in excluding
elected Republican leaders from the budget process. Mr. Malloy didn’t need them
then, and he doesn’t need them now. His call for non-partisanship is an attempt
to tamp down a purely rhetorical opposition. Closing the stops on the
Republican organ would simply add silence to unwitting complicity.

All the major cities in Connecticut are crumbling under the
weight of non-partisanship. They are corrupt and opaque one party towns. Far
from being a vice, partisanship is a positive virtue. A few weeks ago, citizens
in Hartford discovered that the CEO of Jumoke Academy, a charter school, was
using public dollars to feather his own nest while providing jobs to his
relatives. How could this have happened screeched one editorialist? It could and did happen because Hartford has for years been a one party town. There is no live opposition party in Hartford
whose partisanship might have nipped nepotism in the bud long before it
flowered. Where there are no partisan eyes on the ground, there is no effective
political resistance to corrupt tendencies. Where no opposition party is
intolerant of corruption, tolerance of corruption will flourish.

During Mr. Malloy’s budget address on February 18, one
expects the usual self-serving accolades and a good deal of talk about
preparing a future less hostile to business activity, even as taxes and
regulations increase. Big Ideas, rather than cuts in Big Taxes, regulations or
state mandates, will be flourished and the dismal future will receive yet
another fresh coat of rosy red. No one will breathe a word about spending cuts
or – just to choose one money saving example – raising the retirement age of
state workers by five years. All the talk thus far is directed to revenue
increases rather than spending cuts – and that is why the state is cursed with
recurring deficits.